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My Mouse Guns
I had a fellow teacher at Sylmar JH who was with the 173rd. He was a great teacher & a good man to boot! Grumpy Rest easy Buddy!
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Remember this one
The new Springfield Armory M1A Tanker melds the timeless power, utility and class of the traditional M1A rifle with the maneuverability and practicality of the shortened SOCOM 16. The end result offers Information Age function and design along with Old World parkerized steel and stained walnut. However, today’s M1A Tanker has some remarkably deep roots.
Origin Story
Bottom line up front, the “Tanker Garand” as we know it today has a bit of a convoluted history. There was indeed a two-pronged parallel development process during the war to produce a shortened version of the standard M1 rifle for use by paratroopers and jungle fighters, but the term “Tanker Garand” was actually coined in the post-World War II era. However, the same tactical exigencies that drove the genesis of this abbreviated Garand still make for a superlative compact rifle today.
Late in 1944, fortunes were turning against both the Japanese and the Nazis, but there yet remained a great deal of fight left in the snake. Around this time engineers began experimenting with a shortened Garand for use by airborne troops and the like.
That initial effort was marked M1E5 but classified as the M1A3. However, it fared poorly. This new gun incorporated a folding steel pantograph stock that was both unwieldy and uncomfortable. Additionally, the sluggish powders used in wartime .30-06 ammunition lit up the countryside unduly when fired after dark.
Meanwhile, one Colonel William Alexander served on the Pacific Warfare Board, a brain trust of sorts tasked with review of weapons systems in theater from a strategic perspective. He tasked the Ordnance Division of the 6th Army in the Philippines to bodge together some 15,000 shortened M1 rifles for use in confined environments. They eventually produced 150 handmade samples before running out of steam.
These guns ended up going in several different directions with at least one of them actually seeing combat with the 503d Parachute Infantry Regiment. Two of these homebrewed weapons were shipped back to the United States for evaluation. This rejuvenated the previous project and catalyzed yet another updated prototype designated the T26.
The T26 had its barrel shortened from 24 to 18 inches and sported a pruned forearm to match. Soon this endeavor was overshadowed by such stuff as the island-hopping juggernaut and atomic bombing. As a result the T26 project got canned as well.
The military is hard on its toys, so most of those prototype rifles were ground up during testing. The sheer novelty of the things makes them unimaginably valuable to a dedicated Garand nerd.
After the war, the world was covered in a thin patina of small arms, and a lot of returning soldiers and Marines wanted a copy of their service weapon sitting in their closet back home. As a result, enterprising folk sold gobs of military surplus guns. To add some flair to their offerings, the shortened Garand project was resurrected and offered as the infamous “Tanker” Garand.
Information Age Treatment
I’ve spent some time working inside armored vehicles myself, and they are unimaginably cramped. Against all expectations, the M3 Grease Gun, a cheap stamped steel stuttergun that cost a paltry $18 apiece back during World War II, actually soldiered on until the 1990’s as an individual weapon for armor crewmen. The Army didn’t cling to its Grease Guns through the First Gulf War because they were awesome. We kept using the Grease Gun because it was small.
So clearly, compact size was an important feature. But, adapting an M1 Garand into a tanker’s personal defense weapon is about as practical as stuffing a housecat into a Pringles can. There are just better places to keep your cat. However, there yet remains a persistent need for a handier version of a full-sized .30-caliber rifle.
While the M1A Tanker might not be historically accurate in the purest sense, that doesn’t make it any less valuable to today’s shooter. Taking the short and handy concept of the “M1 Tanker” and applying it to the detachable box magazine-fed M1A gives you a rifle that combines “Garand’y” charm with the benefits of the M1A’s more modern updates. The result is a handy and compact .308 that looks the part of a World War II-era rumbler, but gives you a gun that isn’t a priceless prototype that you can actually shoot!
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Passchendaele: A killing field of mud
The most merciless enemy was the foul mud and with it the stink of wet rotting bodies
But in Belgium in 1917, the rain was relentless. It made aerial bombardment impossible and also impeded the transport of heavy guns. Thousands of exhausted horses and mules died attempting to haul gun carriages across the devastated, cratered landscape which had been churned up by shelling.
It took six men to stretcher a wounded soldier across the glue-like surface. Many survivors recalled stumbling along, their boots being sucked off their feet and then came the sensation of sinking up to their waists in mud.
Ypres was not a grand spoil; the old Belgian city had strategic importance as an agricultural and commercial centre dominating Western Flanders. Set in a low-lying, shallow basin about 66 feet above sea level, to the east the topography consists of a series of low, wooded ridges.
From these little hills came streams, more water, always water, but nothing to the amount that appeared as if by an evil force. It was to rain every day but three in the August of 1917. The land had once been reclaimed from the sea through careful draining and irrigation carried out for centuries. Battles had been fought there many times; a century earlier, Wellington and Blücher had bested Napoleon at Waterloo, only 65 miles away.
Wider international developments had taken place. Some months earlier on April 6th, the United States had finally entered the war, provoked by the loss of merchant shipping from German attack.
Meanwhile, the Russian Tsar had abdicated and Lenin, with his mantra of bread for the people, land to the peasant and peace to all peoples, was biding his time in Switzerland. Germany would facilitate his return home by train to a country weary of war yet eager for change.
Exhaustion
The French were exhausted. The Italians had made a five-mile advancement just north of Trieste, only to suffer twice as many losses as the Austrians, so they withdrew. It was left to the British to strike in Flanders and to do it without the Americans. Lloyd George was against the action, yet did nothing to stop it. Gen Haig wanted to advance into Flanders.
The lead-up to the offensive which would begin on July 31st included the blowing up of the 21 mines created under the Messines ridge through the deployment of one million tons of TNT. The planned explosion on June 7th was so terrific it was heard in London, some 200 miles away. It seemed to silence the Germans who withdrew.
It gave the British a short-lived advantage and made their supply lines secure, for a brief period. It would seem that such a spectacular gesture would pay dividends but the next British attack did not take place until July 31st.
By then the Germans had regrouped and completed about six miles of intensive digging in which to position heavy machine guns, mounted in concrete. It didn’t take long for the Tommies to think of a nickname – “pill-boxes”.
Even in hindsight it is difficult to understand, never mind explain, the seven-week lull between Messines and the beginning of Third Ypres, the initial British name for the battle.
Exhaustion is more likely than military complacency. The German response came in the form of six separate defence positions, a forward battle zone, layered and, in effect, creating a formidable battle zone.
The German heavy guns held 64 strong points which remained intact. Early on July 31st when the British attack began shortly before 4am, low cloud obscured the rising sun. Initially the infantry made some advancement along the 11-mile front but not in crucial positions such as a coveted area which was a continuation of the Messines ridge.
It was strategic as it gave the German artillery a height advantage with clear views of the advancing British. The opening hours saw nothing of the carnage of the first day of the Somme, 13 months earlier. But Haig did not want to take the ridges around the Ypres salient; he was intent on a major incursion into the German defences.
What happened next was dictated by nature not generals; heavy rain fell for a week, twice the monthly average even for a region with a damp climate suitable for flax. The shelling tore up the earth and the craters filled with rain which quickly turned to mud. Soldiers drowned in trenches because they were unable to clamber out as the walls gave way under them.
Wounded and dying men being transported on carts pulled by horses and mules, themselves staggering through the quagmires, often rolled off and were lost in the slime which suffocated them.
Even moving the light field artillery was hazardous, moving a single gun about 250 yards required an effort lasting six hours or more. Back in England, rhetoric was being directed at the “evil Hun”; no one mentioned the mud.
Horrors
In time, commanding officers would weep publicly about the horrors their soldiers endured. Maj CL Fox of the 502 Field Company Royal Engineers wrote: “There was no ground to walk on; the earth had been ploughed up by shells not once only, but over and over again, and so thoroughly that nothing solid remained to step on; there was just loose, disintegrated, far-flung earth, merging into slimy, treacherous mud and water round shell holes so interlaced that the circular form of only the largest and most recently made could be distinguished.
“The infantry in the outposts moved hourly from shell hole to shell hole, occupying those that had just been made and which had not, in consequence, yet filled with water. All honour to them and the way they ‘stuck’ it.
“Covered with mud, wet to the skin, bitterly cold, stiff and benumbed with exposure, cowed and deadened by the monotony of 48 hours in extreme danger and by the constant casualties among their mates, they hung on to existence by a thin thread of discipline rather than by any spark of life. Some of the feebler and more highly strung deliberately ended their lives.”
It reads as an account of torture, not war. Admittedly most of the material to hand is written from the British viewpoint and it seems only fair – and necessary – to point out that the German army experienced similar hell in the surreal conditions prevailing in Flanders in late Summer 1917.
Another account, this one written by Bombardier JW Palmer, 26 Brigade Royal Field Artillery, begins “It was mud, mud, everywhere: mud in the trenches, mud in front of the trenches, mud behind the trenches. Every shell hole was a sea of filthy oozing mud.
I suppose there is a limit to everything but the mud of Passchendaele – to see men keep on sinking into the slime, dying in the slime – I think it absolutely finished me off.
“I ‘knew’ for three months before I was wounded that I was going to get it, I knew jolly well. The only thing was I thought I was going to get killed. Every time I went out to mend a wire I think I was the biggest coward on God’s earth. Nobody knew when a wire would go but we knew that it had to be mended . . . There were so many days when I don’t remember what happened because I was so damned tired. The fatigue in that damned mud was something terrible . . . It was very, very difficult to mend a telephone wire in this mud . . . As you got one foot out, the other one would go down.”
Eventually after often wishing he could die, Palmer was severely wounded in heavy shelling. “I was too damned tired even to fall down. I stood there. Next I had a terrific pain in the back and the chest and I found myself face down in the mud. My pal came to me, he tried to lift me. I said to him, ‘Don’t touch me, leave me. I’ve had enough, just leave me.’
Poor devils
“The next thing I found myself sinking down in the mud and I didn’t worry about the mud. I didn’t hate it any more. Then I found myself being bumped about and I realised I was on a stretcher. I thought, ‘Poor devils these stretcher bearers – I wouldn’t be a stretcher bearer for anything.’ ”
After serving in many places throughout the war, including Gallipoli, Irish poet Francis Ledwidge died on the opening day of the battle of Passchendaele.
He was not killed in the line of fire. Instead he was working in a party of soldiers laying duckboards in a vain attempt to create a passable route over the mud, when a German shell hit him. It blew him to pieces before the horrified eyes of his battalion, the 1st Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. The Welsh poet Hedd Wynn, a nationalist to his core who had been opposed to the war, yet signed up, also died that day.
Passchendaele is remembered as a black chapter in a war which was hell. Perhaps it was simply that after three years, no one wanted to go on. The early bravado was long since exhausted. For Captain Harry Yoxall, 18th Battalion, Royal Rifle Corps, “The Third Battle of Ypres someone has called it: but there is only one battle of Ypres. It has lasted from October 1914 and, with Verdun, it is the biggest battle of all.”
Not gas, not tanks, not even aircraft, the most merciless enemy was the foul mud and with it the stink of wet rotting bodies.
Passchendaele exposed the British leadership, the generals. A senior staff officer on finally visiting the battle field, towards the very end, burst into tears and asked his driver: “Did we send our men into that?” The answer was unwelcome, if unavoidable. Yes, they did.
Eileen Battersby is The Irish Times Literary Correspondent
During the Second World War, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Yamato was feared due to its immense size and power. She was the most heavily armed battleship ever built, with nine 18.1-inch (460mm) main guns, the largest ever mounted on a warship. Each shell weighed nearly 1.5 tons and had a range in excess of 26 miles.
Yamato was also the heaviest warship ever constructed and the most heavily armored, leading to a belief she might be “unsinkable.”
Still, today, she lies at the bottom of the East China Sea, about 180 miles southwest of Kyushu, Japan.
The warship was sunk more than 80 years ago, on April 7, 1945, and is now broken into multiple pieces — proof she was neither unsinkable nor as well-protected as her designers may have believed. Naval historians have noted a design flaw, namely that her armor was riveted instead of welded, creating a point of weakness that allowed damage to propagate after bombs and torpedoes struck.
Another notable fact about Yamato is that, due to a shift in naval strategy during the Pacific War, she spent most of her career in naval bases and engaged in combat just a handful of times. Her only real battleship-to-battleship sortie was during the Battle off Samar, part of the larger Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944.
In that engagement, the IJN super battleship was credited with sinking the United States Navy’s Casablanca-class escort carrier USS Gambier Bay (CVE-73) and the Fletcher-class destroyer USS Johnston (DD-557). At the same time, Yamato also inflicted hits on another destroyer, USS Hoel (DD-533), fired by her 6.1-inch guns, contributing to the U.S. warship’s sinking.
Given all the hype, it is hardly an impressive record for what was built to be a decisive weapon, one that could single-handedly defeat multiple U.S. battleships and bring America to the peace table. Obviously, that never happened; instead, it was aircraft that sank the Yamato and her sister ship, the Musashi.
As Bernard Ireland and Eric Grove wrote in Jane’s War at Sea: 1897-1997: 100 Years of Jane’s Fighting Ships, “One of the great unanswered questions of the Pacific War surrounded the likely outcome of a gunnery duel between [the U.S. Navy’s USS] Iowa and a Japanese Yamato.” The authors suggested that speed and maneuverability of the U.S. Navy’s “fast battleship” might have given it an edge, despite being armed with 16-inch guns.
“That the battleship’s day was done, however, was underlined by the loss of both Yamatos to carrier-based air attacks,” Ireland and Grove explained. “As scorpions succumb to a massed attack by ants, so did these super-battleships founder from the cumulative effect of scores of torpedo hits, bomb hits and near misses.”
Building the Yamato
An irony of Yamato is that the Japanese military invested a massive amount of money, resources and time in three super battleships, only to barely utilize them in their intended role. In fact, the third hull of the Yamato-class battleship was converted into the aircraft carrier Shinano, but that is a story for another time.
What is important to the discussion is that the super-battleship was built in keeping with the pre-war naval strategy that called for victory in a “Kantai Kessen” or “decisive battle.” The doctrine had worked in the Russo-Japanese War at the Battle of Tsushima Strait in May 1905, and in the early 1930’s, it remained a sound strategy, at least to Japanese naval designers.
Even as the IJN began to build aircraft carriers, it initially underestimated their capabilities.
That policy evolved, but by then, the construction of Yamato was already underway. The UK’s Royal Navy carried out its raid on the Italian fleet at Taranto in November 1940, which simply confirmed what many in the IJN believed — that carrier-based aircraft could be the weapon to lead a Kantai Kessen doctrine.
What is also known about the construction of the super-battleship is that no fewer than 23 designs were prepared between 1934, when plans for a super battleship were first introduced, and by 1937, two such vessels were ordered. Construction occurred in great secrecy, with Yamato laid down at Kure, Japan, and Musashi in Nagasaki. That included the installation of high fences, protective roofing and camouflage netting.
The debate over the building of Yamato is the central theme of the highly fictionalized 2019 film The Great War of Archimedes. It started a debate over the necessity of such a warship, yet it does put some of the costs in the spotlight. It also explains how truly massive the battleship was compared to existing capital ships of the era.
Well Armed and Armored
As built, Yamato was 263 meters (863 feet) in length, had a beam of 39.9 meters (130 feet, 3 inches), and a full load displacement of 72,809 tons. As previously noted, its primary armament was nine 18.1-inch guns, the largest ever mounted on a warship. Secondary armament consisted of a dozen 6.1-inch (15.5 cm) guns in four triple turrets; guns larger than the primary armament of the U.S. Navy’s Fletcher-class destroyers!
The battleship was initially equipped with 36 25mm anti-aircraft guns and four 13.2mm machine guns. By 1945, the number of 25mm anti-aircraft guns had increased to 162, an indication that the IJN saw what aircraft could do (and had done) to battleships.
The main turrets on Yamato were protected by 9.8 to 25.6 inches of armor, while the battleship’s belt armor was 16.1 inches (410 mm) thick. The deck armor was 7.9 to 9.1 inches (200 to 230mm), and the conning tower was protected by 19.7 inches (500mm) of armor.
Yamato was powered by four steam turbine engines that gave the battleship a top speed of 27 knots (31mph), while she had a range of 7,200 nautical miles. By 1945, her crew consisted of 2,700 officers and sailors.
From Midway to Leyte Gulf
The IJN Yamato was not part of the fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, as the warship was still being fitted out. However, just over six months later, she served as the flagship for IJN Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto at the Battle of Midway in June 1942.
As part of the “Main Body” that stayed about 300 miles behind the carrier strike force, she saw no combat in that action.
The super-battleship was present at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, and then took part in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, specifically the Battle off Samar. It was during that engagement that she was damaged after two bombs dropped by U.S. carrier-based aircraft impacted turret 1. Some crew quarters were destroyed, but Yamato survived the battle. She returned to Brunei for repairs.
Less than six months later, she was sortied on a mission that was to be her last.
Ten-Go
Yamato was ordered to disrupt the American landings at Okinawa. Dubbed “Ten-Go,” it was the final major Japanese naval operation of the Pacific War and called for the super-battleship to beach herself and serve as a coastal defense gun until she was destroyed.
On April 7, 1945, the IJN task force sailed from Japan.
It was also a mission that the crew almost certainly knew they wouldn’t survive, a one-way trip with no air cover and limited fuel supply. There are reports that some crew members were given the option to refuse the mission, but everyone chose to proceed.
What the IJN didn’t know is that the United States Navy had intercepted and decoded radio signals and was prepared to engage the IJN Yamato in the open sea. Within hours, U.S. carrier-based planes launched devastating waves on the IJN task force.
That particular day has been described as having low overcast conditions, which was ideal for an air attack. It was truly like ants carrying out a massed attack on a scorpion. Within 10 minutes of the aircraft engaging the battleship, Yamato had taken two bomb hits and another from a torpedo. One of its escorting destroyers was sunk, and a light cruiser was disabled.
Between 1300 and 1417 hours, the IJN force was under almost continuous air attack.
The scorpion was barely able to sting back, as the anti-aircraft crews lacked adequate training and were only able to shoot down just over half a dozen American aircraft. The U.S. pilots, seeing an opportunity that wasn’t to be missed, piled on the attacks against the battle wagon.
Yamato took at least 12 bombs and seven torpedo hits in just two hours. The combination of bombing and torpedo attacks knocked out every gun on the topside and caused the mighty warship to list significantly. The 1,000 watertight compartments proved ineffective in saving the ship, as the lower decks began to flood.
The sailors clung to what they could, but it was a hopeless endeavor. The ship’s deck went nearly vertical, with her battle flag just barely above the waves.
Shells flew across the ammunition room and crashed against the bulkhead, setting off a chain reaction. The unstable cordite charges in the battleship’s forward leading gun magazines detonated in a massive, spectacular fireball.
It created a mushroom cloud that witnesses said reached a height of over three and a half miles into the sky. It was seen nearly 100 miles away on the Japanese mainland of Kyushu. The force of that blast broke the ship in two and caused her to sink rapidly with a tremendous loss of life.
Just 269 of her crew survived.
The light cruiser Yahagi proved almost as challenging as the battleship, taking 12 bombs and seven torpedo hits before finally sinking. Four IJN destroyers were also sunk or scuttled, while four others that were damaged managed to limp back to Sasebo. An additional 1,167 Japanese sailors were killed on the combined vessels.
A total of 10 U.S. aircraft were shot down in the engagement, with a loss of 12 men.
Sunset of the Battleship Era
The IJN Yamato wasn’t the last battleship to be sunk in combat, as the IJN Hyūga survived until July 28, 1945, when she was sunk in port in Kure Harbor, Japan. Battleships would also remain in service after the war, and the United States Navy briefly returned its four Iowa-class battleships during the 1980s, when then-President Ronald Reagan called for a navy of more than 600 ships.
However, the sinking of Yamato can be seen as symbolizing the end of the battleship era. It demonstrated the vulnerability of the capital ships to air power. It may have been heavily armed and armored, yet it played a minimal role in combat operations.
Had Japan been on the offensive, Yamato could have played a role in providing fire during amphibious landings, but the tide of war turned essentially before such an opportunity was ever presented to the super-battleship.
Destruction of Yamato in Pop Culture
For the Japanese people, the battleship Yamato remains a symbol of national pride, heroic sacrifice and even a cautionary tale about the futility of war. That latter fact is noted in the film The Great War of Archimedes, where (spoilers) it is even suggested that the warship needed to be built to be lost in a heroic sacrifice. The 2019 film even opens with the warship’s destruction in Operation Ten-Go. It is a dramatized depiction that relies heavily on CGI, but is still worth watching.
The final mission of the IJN Yamato is also presented in the 2005 film Yamato, which chronicles the last year of the ship’s service. The film’s final act also recreates the April 7 air assault that destroyed the battleship.
Both films received high praise in Japan.
The 2005 movie was filmed on a 1:1 scale replica of the forward section and the portside anti-aircraft guns. After filming was completed, the set was open to the public for nearly a year, during which it attracted more than 1 million visitors. Model maker Tamiya also released special-edition scale models of the battleship to coincide with the film’s release, and the company even produced a special 1:350-scale diorama of the wreck site.
Finally, Yamato has remained a staple of Japanese pop culture, including the anime series Space Battleship Yamato, which was released in the U.S. under the title Star Blazers.
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